programmer fonts : Java Glossary

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programmer fonts

Most monospaced fonts are reminiscent of mechanical typewriters, or are ugly and
amateurish. his one. A programmer font needs the following characteristics:

Monospaced.

Legible in small font sizes on screen and print. It needs to be well hinted,
yet still be an OpenType font, not just pure bitmap so that it can be used in
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and
documentation as well.

The letters uvw wW gq9 2z 5s il17|!j oO08¤
;:,‚„. "`‘’ m nn rn
{[()]} all must be very distinct, even if you have to distort the glyphs.
The punctuation should be oversized for clarity.

Rich character set at least including the accented letters é Ç, (for internationalisation) and currency symbol
¤.

The font should not be needlessly horizontally or vertically elongated. Every
pixel of screen real estate is valuable to a programmer. You want to pack as much
as possible on the screen without it giving you a headache to look at.

The lower case letters have to relatively tall compared with the caps.

The letters with loops need ample open white space.

The ability to proofread accurately is the most important, which must take
precedence over normal rules of typographical design. You have to view a full page of
text then try a font out for a week to see how well it works in your various
applications and to discover its warts. Just looking at a font sample in a large
point size is quite misleading. Unfortunately, when you buy fonts, that is all you
can do before you buy.

The following fonts are the best programmer fonts I have found so far. I consider
only fonts that are scalable. The best are near the top.

Bitstream Vera Sans Mono Includes mono and proportional variants, oblique and
bold. Created by BitStream. Looks wretched without anti-aliasing. Looks superb
with it. All characters have easily distinguished shapes. The w and m don’t
fill in with small font sizes. You can even read it at 8 points. Free. You might
want to have some other font in your back pocket to use where anti-aliasing is
not available. If you use this font is a web page, others may not have it and
even if they download it, they may not have anti-aliasing. If I were designing
the font, I would make the m more open, by reducing the length of the middle
stem, so it would look like an ε rotated. The psychological feel of the
font is relaxation and calm. I can’t explain how it creates that illusion.
This is what I am using myself, at least for now. BitStream
Vera Sans Mono looks like this:

Pragmata: elegant, clear,
Euro-looking, but costs
€90.00 EUR
.
Comes in Mac and PC (Personal Computer) versions.
Reminds me of the fonts used by Burroughs in the 1980s.
Astoundingly clear at 9 points. Here is what it looks like. The letters are all
beautifully distinct and compact. Pragmata looks like
this:

The font’s designer Fabrizio Schiavi kindly prepared the above sample
for me using my FontShower
Applet. His font does not actually support the accented g character, so he
substituted one. That is why it looks different from all the other characters.
The only weakness is 8/0 are a bit too similar. I wonder how you could fix that
perhaps clearing the centre of the 0 and making it shorter and putting a diagonal
ear in the upper left and lower right corner, like a slashed 0, but with the
center open. Perhaps just as small dot in the middle, or perhaps the way Vera
does it with a horizontal bar across only the right half of the 0.

Pragmata
Pro: an improved version of Pragmata, by the same Italian font designer,
Fabrizio Schiavi. It is even more expensive at
€170.00 EUR
. But it is possible to get it for only
€20.00 EUR
.
It is such an important font, I have given it its own entry in the glossary. This is what I mostly use
myself.

Here is what PragmataPro looks like:

Andale Mono: characters are
very distinct.
$30.00 USD
.
You can study this font without buying it by using the font sample generator
available at the link. Its weakness are the various quotes. They are delicate and
hard to tell apart except at quite large sizes. I wish type designers would make
punctuation bigger and more distinct in small point sizes and make them less
obtrusive and deformed in the larger sizes. Andale Mono
looks like this:

A free, open source font by Adobe. It comes with 7 weights. It is a professionally done font, rather boxy looking. There is a companion open source
proportional Source Sans Pro.
Source Code Pro looks like this:

TheSansMono: A quite beautiful font. This comes
in 3 widths, 8 weights and italics. The catch is you have to buy each variant as
a separate font. If you get just the four basics, it will cost you a whopping
$98.00 USD
. There are related proportional fonts
too. TheSansMono looks like this:

Consolas comes with Vista+. Quite
nice looking, especially on an LCD (Liquid Crystal Display)
at high res. The dots over the i’s in italic are oddly extremely displaced
to the right. The i1l are not quite as distinct as I
would like. The braces are look a bit too much like vertical bars {|}. The letters
touch so that rn and nn
look too much like m. Consolas looks like this:

DPCustomMono2: is a true proofreading font. However, it
has some flaws in the metrics that cause some apps to render insanely every once
in a while. Good for viewing, but not for editing. It absolutely must have
anti-aliasing to be tolerable. Free. DPCustomMono2 looks like this: